The report says a large fraction of rural Pakistani households no longer lives in a village with one or two government schools. Half the population of rural Punjab lives in villages where parents can choose from 7 or 8 schools.
“Government schools, despite being staffed with better-educated and better-paid teachers, are now competing for the same segment of students, even in rural areas,” said Tahir Andrabi, Associate Professor Pomona College and an author of the report.
“Some 18 percent of the poorest third sends their children to private schools in villages where they exist. This is partly because private schools are cheap - one month's fee in a private school is roughly the equivalent of one day's wage for an unskilled laborer. This emerging reality is an opportunity and a challenge for educational policy.”
While overall enrollments increased by 10 percent between 2001 and 2005, the report says quality of education is lagging and children perform significantly below curricular standards for common subjects and concepts at their grade-level. Children in private schools score significantly higher than those in government schools, even when they are from the same village.
In fact, it will take children in government schools 1.5 - 2.5 years of additional schooling to catch up to where private school children are in Class 3. Better learning results in private schools do not arise from higher costs — it costs half as much to educate a child in a private school (Rs.1000 per year) compared to a government school (Rs.2000 per year).
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